Nobody knows who did it, but someone from Canyon City once slipped over to the town of Greenhorn and stole the town's hoosegow.

The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo was flown by an Oregon bomb group.

Meet some of the local aviators who carried the war to the Japanese mainland.

Had Oregon been less unfriendly, Tarzan might never have been written.

Pulp-fiction legend Edgar Rice Burroughs once tried his luck as a gold-dredge operator on the Snake. Luckily for Tarzan fans, he lost his shirt.

Dynamite and crime in Oregon: Like Oreos and milk, only louder.

Dynamite was once so easy to get hold of in Oregon, it was used for all sorts of things ...

the pioneer nurseryman and his 'free love cult'

The father of Oregon horticulture, the man who brought us the Bing Cherry, kind of went around the bend a bit later in life ....

The short, tragic story of portland's whale:

Was it too much to ask the city's Nimrods to leave the poor beast alone? Yes, it most certainly was.

the real story behind “bicycle face”

How the adoption of new business tactics by Portland brothels killed the bike-riding fad dead as a brick in the late 1890s.

Oregon's most notorious shanghaiier

Meet the legendary Joseph “Bunco” Kelley, star of dozens of waterfront stories ... some of which may even be true.

Of secret sunken submarines — and l. ron hubbard

Did the famous pulp writer and religious figure really sink two Japanese submarines off Cape Lookout?

A bad batch of 'Dehorn' alcohol killed 28 hobos

Skid Road alcoholics knew denatured alcohol might make you sick, but it wouldn't kill you. Until one day, it did.

Iconic movies shot in Oregon

A three-part series covering 16 of the most influential Oregon films, from 1908 to 1989.

The forgotten world of urban opium dens

A century ago, the drug's mysterious, smoky allure held society spellbound. And Portland was the West Coast's main supply point.

The world's only working PT boat is docked in Portland

The PT-658 is among the last of its kind, and it's the only one that still goes out on the water.

Bad recording job led to an
F.B.I. investigation for Portland band

No one could understand the lyrics in The Kingsmen's recording of 'Louie Louie," but many tried ... and some of them had rather dirty minds.

How Bill Miner learned to rob trains ... he learned the hard way.

But his botched Portland job appears to have inspired an iconic 1903 movie called 'The Great Train Robbery' a month or two later. Maybe he even watched it later ... in prison.

Goofy was from Oregon. Also Bluto, Grumpy, Sleepy, Bozo, dozens more.

Vance "Pinto" Colvig, from Jacksonville, was a pioneer in animated cartoons and a gifted show-biz man.

When the 'Dark Strangler' preyed on Portland landladies

His M.O. was simple: While a woman was showing him a room or house for rent, he'd strangle her, take her jewelry and flee.

The tawdriest love triangle in the history of the universe.

Lulu Reynolds was having a torrid affair with her music teacher. Her husband carried a .38 in his jacket pocket. It wasn't the kind of thing that ends well. It didn't.

Graft, corruption, racketeering, and ... uh, pinball?

Until just a few dozen years ago, pinball was illegal, and the mobbed-up characters who supplied the games played for keeps.

The Roseburg "newspaper war" that was settled with a gunfight

The owners of rival papers escalated their war of words when they went for pistols on a downtown street one morning in 1871.

The legend of cool-cat skyjacker
D.B. Cooper:
What happened?

The man calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted into legend, and 40 years later the case remains unsolved ... but there are plenty of theories.

The bank robber who became vice-president of the bank he robbed

After he got out of prison, Dave Tucker spent 30 years rebuilding his reputation in his hometown of Joseph, and it seems he succeeded.

The Rise and Fall of the House of Klux in Oregon

A slick marketing campaign and a taste for political power marked the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, which spread through Oregon like a racist virus — and then collapsed.

When prineville was ruled by masked vigilante riders

In Crook County, the early 1880s were like a Louis L'Amour novel. And it all started with the lynching of an innocent man.

Senator John H. Mitchell: Oregon's own real-life Snidely Whiplash

He abandoned his family, changed his name, moved to Oregon, bilked widows and orphans in two big real-estate swindles ... and was promptly elected to Congress.

Navy schooner doomed by skipper’s fear of skipping sailors

As sailors melted away to take advantage of the opportunities in the new Oregon country, their captain sweated bullets; they could not be replaced. But his haste to get back out to sea while he still could set the stage for disaster.

This reward poster, authored and commissioned by Captain Howison of the USS Shark, minced few words about Howison’s opinion of their character. (Image: Oregon State Archives)

By Finn J.D. John — July 26, 2015

LOWER COLUMBIA RIVER, 1846— History is not always made by the “great.” Sometimes key points in history turn on people like 25-year-old ex-sailor John Tice.

Tice, according to the United States Navy, “pretends to be a blacksmith, but is a bungler at that or any other business he undertakes.”

The officer who wrote those words had no idea how much Tice’s “bungling” would affect him personally. There’s some reason to believe that Tice and a half dozen of his fellow sailors were ultimately responsible for one of the most storied shipwrecks of the 1800s — and, incidentally, for putting the “cannon” in Cannon Beach.

They did this by quitting — slipping away from the U.S. Navy schooner U.S.S. Shark during its two-month survey-and-exploration mission of the Oregon country, during the summer of 1846.

Sailors deserting from that particular ship at that particular time in the Oregon country posed a massive problem for their skipper. They could not be replaced. The only non-Native American men in the Oregon Territory in 1846 were people who had paid vast sums and made enormous sacrifices to get there. Nobody who had made the grueling overland journey along the Oregon Trail would ever think of signing onto a Navy ship for seaman’s wages after arriving there. Especially not in the summertime.

Moreover, the residents of Astoria — where the men were believed to be hiding out — showed no sign of responding to the generous bounties offered for their recapture. It looked like the deserters were home free, in a wild new state full of freedom and opportunity.

This fact was not lost on the other sailors on the Shark, who were already resentful of the Navy’s official policy on ships in port — designed to prevent desertion. The policy was, sailors were denied any shore leave, and had to remain on board the ship even when it was securely anchored in the same place for days on end.

The USS Shark as she appeared in the mid-1830s during a voyage in the Mediterranean Sea, as depicted in a watercolor painting by Francois Roux. (Image: Naval Historical Center)

As a result, on shore, sailors could see the generous sunshine and scenic beauty of a temperate northwest Oregon summer — but they couldn’t go experience it.

Now they were beginning to see that if they could but slip away in the middle of the night, their chances of getting away clean were pretty good. And if enough of them acted on that realization, the Shark’s captain, Lt. Neil M. Howison, stood a pretty good chance of getting stranded there, without enough crew members to sail back home.

And so, in the grand old tradition of haste making waste, Howison wrapped up his business in record time and ordered his ship out to sea with an almost panicky urgency — when a delay of a few days would probably have made all the difference between success and soggy, chilly, humiliating failure.

The hunter of slave ships

The U.S.S. Shark may have been the most historically significant floating object to enter the Columbia River in the entire 19th century. It had been built 25 years before, and still represented a powerful threat as a Navy ship.

It was a small ship, just 86 feet long and displacing 200 tons. It was designed as a pirate hunter, intended to help make the Caribbean Sea a less dangerous place for American merchant ships. Its hull was that of a Baltimore clipper, and it was rigged as a topsail schooner, with aggressively raked masts and a colossal square topsail on the main, all of which made it extraordinarily fast while keeping its draft shallow.

The Shark also was endowed with a particularly hefty load of firepower for such a small warship: a pair of rifled long guns throwing nine-pound cannonballs, and eight beefy, short-range carronades throwing 32-pound charges.

This combination would have been a deadly one in a fight with any pirate ship of the day. But its first assignment, in 1821, was to operate against a different kind of pirate: slave traders. The slave trade had been outlawed for American skippers and traders in 1808, but that hadn’t ended the practice, and American, Portugese and French smugglers continued hauling unfortunate Africans across the sea to plantations of sugar and cotton in the Caribbean and the American South.

Of course, the rescued slaves had to be taken somewhere. So in 1821, the year it was launched, the Shark brought Dr. Eli Ayres to Sierra Leone to acquire land in West Africa for what would become the nation of Liberia — where the former slaves were resettled after being rescued from their hellships (and, in most cases, nursed back to health).

Later the Shark’s captain, Matthew Perry — the same man who famously visited and “opened” Japan some years later — found and formally took possession of a Caribbean island that he dubbed Thompson’s Island, after the U.S. Secretary of the Navy. Thompson’s Island is, today, better known as Key West.

Then in 1839, the doughty little schooner became the first U.S. Navy ship to ever pass through the notoriously stormy and dangerous Strait of Juan de Fuca from east to west, making its way to the Pacific Ocean.

Meanwhile, things were brewing on the west side of the new nation that the Navy thought might require a little gunboat diplomacy — in particular a forthcoming war with Mexico and growing strife with the British over who was going to control what part of the Oregon country. And in 1846, the Shark got orders to exercise that gunboat diplomacy on the Columbia River.

Those pesky limeys

The British had had the upper hand in the Oregon country nearly from the start, with their professional and well-run Hudson’s Bay Company outpost at Fort Vancouver. The entire area in question, in addition to today's Oregon, included Washington as well, along with much of British Columbia; and it had been held under a joint-occupancy treaty since the conclusion of the War of 1812.

By the early 1840s, though, this treaty had started showing strain. What started as a tiny trickle of American emigrants showing up and claiming homesteads turned, after about 1843, into a great torrent of covered wagons. By the time the Shark arrived, the territory — which, just seven years earlier had been virtually all British — was peppered with American sodbusters, some of whom were starting to jump the claims of the Hudson’s Bay Company north of the Columbia.

Tensions were getting very high. The slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” was coined about this time among Eastern newspapers — meaning that the Americans were determined to have all the territory, clear up to the boundary of Russian America (now Alaska). The British weren’t keen to fight, but fairly confident that if they did, they’d win this time. Clearer American heads agreed, and were working hard to come to some kind of arrangement by which these two great international powers could be prevented from getting into a massive, bloody war over a tiny frontier outpost in the middle of nowhere.

By the end of the Shark’s time in Oregon waters, it had been quite successful. The British got the message as intended; meanwhile, with officers of the United States Navy on the scene to enforce the law, rogue American settlers were much more tractable, and several land disputes were settled in favor of the British, whose authority the American settlers had been unwilling to recognize. Had it not been for the pesky problem of sailors deserting to join the settlers’ ranks, Captain Howison would have been most pleased with the success of his mission.

Instead, he found himself hurrying through his duties, racing against time, desperate to get his mission done and the bar behind him before a critical mass of his sailors figured out how to get off the ship.

That haste would cost him greatly — although his loss in 1846 would be our gain today. We’ll talk about that in next week’s column.

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